shoulders?--naked and unashamed. Hullo!"--he looked round him--"don't
tell Patricia I said so--or Hugh."

"There is no room for a middle party," was the Vicar's fierce reply.
"Socialists on the one side, Tories on the other!--that'll be the
Armageddon of the future."

The doctor, declining to be drawn, nodded placidly through the clouds of
smoke that enwrapped him. The Vicar hurried away, accompanied, however,
furtively to the door, even to the gate of the drive, by Mrs.
Roughsedge, who had questions to ask.

She came back presently with a thoughtful countenance.

"I asked him what he thought I ought to do about those tales I told you
of."

"Why don't you settle for yourself?" cried the doctor, testily. "That is
the way you women flatter the pride of these priests!"

"Not at all. _You_ make him talk nonsense; I find him a fount of
wisdom."

"I admit he knows some moral theology," said Roughsedge, thoughtfully.
"He has thought a good deal about 'sins' and 'sin.' Well, what was his
view about these particular 'sinners'?"

"He thinks Diana ought to know."

"She can't do any good, and it will keep her awake at nights. I object
altogether."

However, Mrs. Roughsedge, having first dropped a pacifying kiss on her
husband's gray hair, went up-stairs to put on her things, declaring that
she was going there and then to Beechcote.

The doctor was left to ponder over the gossip in question, and what
Diana could possibly do to meet it. Poor child!--was she never to be
free from scandal and publicity?

As to the couple of people involved--Fred Birch and that odious young
woman Miss Fanny Merton--he did not care in the least what happened to
them. And he could not see, for the life of him, why Diana should care
either. But of course she would. In her ridiculous way, she would think
she had some kind of responsibility, just because the girl's mother and
her mother happened to have been brought up in the same nursery.

"A plague on Socialist vicars, and a plague on dear good women!" thought
the doctor, knocking out his pipe. "What with philanthropy and this
delicate altruism that takes the life out of women, the world becomes a
kind of impenetrable jungle, in which everybody's business is
intertwined with everybody else's, and there is nobody left with
primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that
might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled
and hamstrung by what we cal